Ingex

Ingex is a suite of software applications designed to enable low-cost flexible tapeless television production. The functionality of the software includes SDI video and audio capture, real-time transcoding and wrapping in MXF, archiving to LTO-3 tape and network file serving of media files. The software was originally developed by BBC Research and Development in 2005 for series three of the BAMZOOKi BBC children's program and is now released under the terms of the GPL software licence.

Two white papers describing Ingex and its use for the BBC BAMZOOKi production are available. The first paper looks in particular at the use of MXF and AAF files in the system, while the second paper looks at the practical benefits achieved by the tapeless capture and logging system. An 8 minute video (63MB) has been produced demonstrating the use of Ingex for BAMZOOKi.

The software consists of the following components :
Ingex Studio - a multi-camera television studio ingest and transcoding system.
Currently supported SD codecs are :
- Avid-compatible JPEG codec resolutions known as 2:1, 3:1, 10:1, 20:1, 15:1s, 10:1m, 4:1m
- DVCPRO50 (50 Mbps)
- DV (25 Mbps)
- D10 50/40/30 Mbps
- Uncompressed SD video at 8 bits-per-sample and 10 bits-per-sample

Supported HD codecs are :
- VC-3 (DNxHD) at 120 and 185 Mbps
- DVCPRO HD (100 Mbps)
- Uncompressed HD video at 8 bits-per-sample

Ingex Player - software player for playback of MXF OP-Atom and MXF OP-1a files. Supports playout to computer monitor or over SDI I/O card. Features include quad-split, audio monitor, timecode display and jog-shuttle control.

Ingex Archive - ingest system designed for video tape archive preservation. Video tape is played back from a VTR, ingested over SDI, and stored as an MXF OP-1a file, including all audio channels, VITC and LTC timecodes and archive database metadata. Features include VTR-control, D-3 tape error recording, PSE analysis and H.264 browse generation.

MediaHarmony - a Samba VFS module which allows multiple Avid editing workstations to use low-cost commodity storage without conflicts around the .pmr and .mdb database files. This is particularly useful for workgroups of editors using Avid XpressDV.

The source code for the Ingex software is available for download.